by Suzi Moore
I looked up at him and frowned.
‘Alice, come on, don’t look like that. You love playing with Florence and they’re all so excited to meet your little sister.’
I sat there with my arms folded across my chest and thought about Florence and how she had ignored me the whole time we were at Pengarden. Perhaps I’d just ignore her this time, see how she liked it.
That night I dreamt that I was sleeping in Mum’s princess bed, but water came in through the windows and under the door, and it started to fill the room until I was drowning and I couldn’t get out. I woke up suddenly. My heart was beating quickly, but the pain that I felt at the side of my head was not in my dream: it was real and more painful than anything I’d ever felt. It was like a red-hot poker was being jabbed inside my ear and when I turned my head the pain shot up the side of my face, along my cheek and behind my eyes. I tried to turn over, but my neck felt stiff, and when I turned the light on the brightness hurt my eyes so badly I had to look away. And it got worse and worse until I couldn’t bear it any longer and I was crying and screaming in pain. Until I think I was shouting something.
Dad was the first to come crashing into my room, followed shortly by Mum and the forever-crying baby. When Dad saw my scarlet cheeks and swollen jaw, he put his arm out to stop Mum coming closer.
‘Stay there,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll go and get my bag.’
That’s the great thing about having a dad who’s a doctor. If you’re really ill and in monster pain, he can fix it pretty quickly, and sometimes I just feel better when I see him and his big doctor bag. I heard Dad whisper something into Mum’s ear and when he ran back down the hallway Mum sort of backed away from the door.
‘I’m so sorry you’re hurting, Alice, but Dad is going to make it better.’
I tried to smile, but it hurt the side of my face so much it made me cry instead, and when Dad came back with his bag of magic medicine I heard him tell Mum to take the baby back to the nursery.
Dad looked in my ear and down my throat. He checked my heart, tapped on my back and when he shone a little light in my eyes it hurt so much I had to turn away quickly, but as I did the pain in the side of my head went right down my neck and I fell back on to the pillow. Normally I start to feel better when Dad is there with his bag, but this time I didn’t. Instead I started to feel worse and worse and, as I rested my head on the pillow, it felt as though it was being bashed against a pile of rocks.
I didn’t have the lovely banana-flavoured medicine or the pink one either. I didn’t have a tablet or the fizzy drinking one. This time I had to have an injection and Dad had to hold me still while I wriggled under the covers in agony.
‘Alice,’ he said softly.
I opened my eyes, but the room looked funny. Everything was getting blurred and smudgy and, when I opened my mouth to speak, my mouth felt dry and sandy. My eyelids closed and the last words I heard were, ‘Alice, where have you been?’
23
Zack
Alice Richardson is a chatterbox.
At first it was, like, really weird to hear her speaking. I mean, it was weird when she didn’t speak, but I kind of got used to it. Now I’m going to have to get used to the chatter, chatter, chatter. It’s not like I don’t want to know stuff about her or anything. I mean, for the last two weeks I sort of guessed stuff. I made up an imaginary world that Alice comes from.
After Mum showed me the photograph of the creepy house with its windows all boarded up, I imagined that Alice’s world was full of cobwebs, dungeons and scary parents. Before she spoke, I figured that if she didn’t talk it was because she was too scared to and perhaps her parents were the sort of monsters that would lock her in the attic if she was bad.
Then, when she told me that her parents could never know she’d been to the beach, I wondered why. It didn’t make sense; it wasn’t as though she had to swim round the headland to get there. From what she told me, she could just walk out of her garden and down the path, but her parents had told her it was forbidden and that anyway the path was covered in a landslide, but that just wasn’t true. Why had they lied to her? If you have one of the world’s best beaches practically at the bottom of your garden, why would you not be allowed to go there? I didn’t get it.
I had helped Alice get home and was just hiding her wet clothes at the back of the bathroom cupboard when I heard Mum come home from work.
‘What have you been up to all day then?’ she asked as I walked into the kitchen.
I thought about the nearly-drowned Alice and shrugged my shoulders. ‘Nothing much.’
‘Nothing?’ she said, making a cup of tea. ‘And where did you go to do nothing much?’
‘Nowhere,’ I said, thinking about the black and gold shiny gates of Culver Manor.
‘All day?’
‘Yeah, pretty much.’
‘Hmm,’ she said, pouring a ridiculous amount of milk into her mug. ‘Well, do you think you might put some suncream on your face next time you go nowhere to spend all day doing “nothing much”?’ She kissed my cheek, but didn’t say anything else and, after a while, I went back upstairs and tried calling Lou again.
It was weird; we didn’t really talk on the phone much when we lived practically round the corner from each other. I mean, he’d, like, call and say, ‘I can come over at six’ or ‘If we pick you up, can your mum collect us from the cinema?’ So we never phoned each other to, like, just talk and these days it felt a bit strange. It was as though he didn’t know what to say and most of the time I didn’t either. The phone rang and rang, and when the answering machine started I sighed, hung up and lay back on the bed.
I started wondering if Alice had made it. I wondered if she’d followed the plan like I’d suggested.
The next morning I was mucking around with my skateboard when Mum left for work.
‘Stay out of trouble, please,’ she shouted out of the car window and I watched her drive off.
I turned back towards the cottage, heard the chugging noise again and when I looked up the little blue plane was back. I watched it soar higher and higher, and I must have been standing like that for ages when the postman came up behind me. He gave me such a fright I jumped up and fell backwards into the rose bush.
‘Sorry,’ he said, helping me to my feet. ‘Lovely little plane, isn’t it? I’ve been up in it once too.’
‘Whose is it?’ I asked without thinking.
‘George Moore. He’s a bit of an old eccentric. Lives on the top of Porlock Hill,’ he said, pointing to the hill that Mum and I had scrambled up on my first day. ‘He collects all sorts of old cars and bikes and that’s his little plane. Lovely old boy he is. Everyone loves George.’
I took the pile of post out of his hand, but as I walked back inside the cottage I started to feel a bit sad. I thought about Dad again. I thought about his yellow plane and when I closed my eyes I saw it all again. I saw it falling, falling, and I had to shake my head to stop me seeing any more.
I still hadn’t cleaned my teeth when Pippa came over, but my eyes lit up when I saw she had brought two enormous sausage rolls with her.
‘Well, I could have brought you one of my world–famous, hideous sandwiches on slightly mouldy bread, but I think these are just the ticket for a hungry boy.’
‘You eat mouldy sandwiches?’ I said, looking up at her.
‘Oh well, it has been known. That’s what happens if you try and make lunch without putting your glasses on.’
I inspected the sausage rolls for signs of mould.
‘You friends with that Alice then?’ she suddenly said. When I didn’t reply, she said, ‘I saw you with her yesterday. Are you friends? Does she talk to you?’
I still didn’t say anything because I really didn’t want to get Alice in trouble and, after a while, she gave up and made herself a cup of tea and I stuffed the lovely warm pastry in my mouth.
Later that day, I scrambled over the last boulder to Culver Cove, but Alice wasn’t on the beach. I
hoped she was OK.
When she wasn’t there the day after that, I started to imagine that maybe she hadn’t made it back to the house in time. I imagined she’d been caught just as she got to the door and was now locked in the attic where she would spend the rest of the summer. On the third day of her being missing I was just drying off from a swim when I saw a pink thing out of the corner of my eye. The bag! I’d totally forgotten I’d promised Alice I’d get it back for her. I suddenly felt really bad that I’d forgotten. Luckily, it hadn’t rained the whole week.
I walked over to the bag and picked it up and that’s when I realised that being on the beach wasn’t as much fun without Alice. I mean, even though she’s a girl and even though she’s too scared to swim with the seals, it was kind of better with her. Bodyboarding was more fun when there was someone there to laugh or cheer you along.
Alice reminds me a bit of Lou because she always seems to want to do something a bit silly to make me laugh. She does these really funny animal walks that are made up of two different animals. It’s a bit like charades and I have to guess which end of her is what animal. I don’t know why it’s funny, but it is. I think the chicken shark was the one that made me sort of laugh all day. It makes me smile just thinking about it.
I put the bag on my shoulder and decided to head home, when something caught my eye. A shape at the far end of the beach. No, not a shape, a person. A person who was not Alice. It was a man. I saw him wave and start running towards me. My feet sank into the sand and my heart began to beat faster. I thought about the ‘Private property. Keep out’ sign and my stomach flipped over a bit like when you drive over a bridge really fast. I was so in for it now. I looked at the water, but the tide was still really high. My heart started beating faster and faster. How could I get off the beach now? I didn’t want to do the scary swim round the headland. I never wanted to swim that far out again after what nearly happened to Alice.
The man came closer and I heard him shout out. I knew I had to do something, but I was trapped. What if that was Alice’s scary dad? What would he do? Would he grab me and drag me back up the beach? What do they do to people who trespass on their special beach? I turned to look back at the water, but there was no way I wanted to try swimming out there again. I looked back up towards the man; he was getting closer and closer. I had no choice. There was nothing else I could do; there was nowhere I could run; so I turned round and, even though the tide was as high as I have ever seen it, I started to wade into the sea.
24
Zack
‘No!’ shouted the man, but I carried on.
‘Please don’t!’ I heard him shout again. ‘Please!’
Something in his voice told me he wasn’t angry. I stopped just as the water reached my knees and when I turned back the man was racing down the beach towards me. I watched him slowly walk over to me and I could see that he had the sort of hair that isn’t really red like Lexi’s, but it isn’t really blonde either, and he was probably one of the tallest men I had ever seen. I felt afraid, but as he got closer he smiled. When he saw my frightened face, he crouched down and spoke in the softest, kindest voice.
‘I’m David. I’m Alice’s dad. You’re not in any trouble, but please don’t swim round the headland. It’s too dangerous.’ He held out a freckly hand to me and I told him my name.
He was nothing like I’d imagined at all. He wasn’t, you know, some kind of horrid ogre dad like I thought he might be. He was really nice and he wasn’t mad at all.
‘Those “Keep out” signs were put there a long time ago by my father,’ he said, pointing out towards the boulder, and I felt a little shudder ripple down my spine. ‘My father thought it would be better to stop anyone trying to come here from the other side in case somebody from the village drowned.’
I thought about Alice and my heart skipped a beat. He looked at me with squinty eyes and then he smiled. I waded back towards the shore.
‘I haven’t been down here for years,’ he said, resting his back against one of the two boulders that looked like pillars. ‘I forgot how beautiful it is.’ He reached out a hand towards me. ‘I’ll take Alice’s bag, shall I? Not sure I’d have wanted to have been seen with a pink Barbie bag when I was your age. Unless this is actually your bag of course?’
I laughed. ‘Er, that’s a no.’
‘Didn’t think so. Hmm,’ he said, looking at the picture on the front of the bag, ‘I’ll never understand why girls like this sort of thing.’
‘Me neither,’ I said, laughing. ‘My friend Lexi has a bedroom that is literally pink times four hundred.’
‘Ha! That’s good. Well, I don’t know about you, Zack, but I’m hungry times four hundred so let’s head back up the safe way. Let’s get you home.’
I followed him towards the waterfall, but all I could think about was whether he would tell Mum.
‘I hear you’ve moved here from London.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I went to university in London. Great place to live, but it’s pretty good down here too. Zack,’ he said slowly, ‘is there anything you think you should tell me?’
I felt my cheeks get hot and I looked down at the sand.
‘If I was your age,’ he said, putting the rucksack on his shoulder, ‘and had just moved here, I might just go off exploring too, Zack.’
I kind of smiled, looked up at him and decided that Alice must have told her parents all about me in her new chatterbox voice, but I was wrong. Dr Richardson had heard all about me and Alice from Pippa when he’d been to the post office that morning, but he didn’t know everything.
We went back to Culver Manor along the path and even though I’m not really scared of heights or anything like that I felt really dizzy when I looked down the waterfall. When I saw the ledge that Alice had had to jump over every time she came down, I was really impressed that she’d made it. Alice might not have wanted to get too close to the seals, but she was brave enough to do that scary jump every time.
At the door Dr Richardson stopped. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?’ he asked me again. ‘I won’t be cross.’
I shook my head. I felt myself get nervous. Maybe I should tell him, I thought. Perhaps it won’t matter. But then I remembered that I had promised Alice, and Dad always said you should never, ever break your promises.
We walked through the garden side by side, but I wasn’t really paying attention to anything, and when we got to the driveway Dr Richardson put the little rucksack down and sighed. ‘Zack, you’re not in any trouble, but there’s something you should know. It’s about Alice.’
I listened quietly and looked down at the ground. Poor Alice. I didn’t dare look up in case I blurted it out. I was bound to get the blame. If they knew that Alice had followed me, if they knew she’d copied me, I’d be in more trouble than I’d ever been in my whole entire life. As I listened to what had happened to Alice the night she’d been rescued, I felt worse than ever. I stared at the tops of my trainers and bit down hard on my lip. I stood like that for ages and when I didn’t say a word Dr Richardson looked down at me hopefully.
‘Well, you’d best get home, Zack,’ he said. But as I turned to leave he shouted, ‘Say hi to your mum, won’t you?’
Mum got home about five minutes after me and I came downstairs slowly to say hello. I don’t know why, but I felt like the only thing I wanted was a hug from her or something.
‘Well, that’s a lovely way to be greeted,’ she said as I squeezed her tightly. ‘It’s like having old Zack back again.’ I looked at her face and noticed a red mark across her cheek.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, touching the red mark which felt swollen under my fingers.
‘Oh, that’s your mother trying to do everything in time for yesterday as usual. I was standing on a chair to get some art supplies down from a cupboard and managed to knock a plastic storage box on top of me. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt. It was more embarrassing than anything because the whole of t
he staffroom saw,’ she said, laughing, and I squeezed her even more tightly.
That night I got my guitar out from under my bed and we did something we hadn’t done since Dad died. I sat on the sofa next to Mum and I played and played as she sang one of her favourite songs. That’s the weird thing about my mum. She’s short and sort of spiky, but she has the softest, loveliest singing voice that you ever heard. It made me think of what Dad had told me.
‘The first time I saw your mum she was sitting cross-legged and playing the guitar. Every girl in the room disappeared when I saw her. All my worries stopped being worries when I heard her sing.’
And he was right. All my worries stopped feeling horrid for a while. I forgot the sad news about Alice I had heard from Dr Richardson. There was a happy, warm feeling in the house until the phone rang. Mum took the call and when she was finished she looked at me with angry, scary eyes that were filled with tears.
‘What the hell have you been up to?’ she shouted.
Everything was fine until it wasn’t.
25
Zack
‘You’ve got some explaining to do!’ she said, but I didn’t look up. ‘That was David Richardson on the phone. I knew something funny was going on with you. Well? What have you got to say for yourself?’ Her voice got louder and louder, but I didn’t know what to say. ‘I told you about staying away from that beach. I specifically told you not to go there. I made it absolutely clear, didn’t I?’
That’s when I realised she was actually upset. She wasn’t just angry; she had eyes that were filled with tears too.
‘Poor Alice,’ she kept saying over and over again. ‘Poor David.’ She sighed and looked at me. ‘Zack? Why?’
I didn’t say a thing, but as she closed the curtains above the television I noticed the blue flashing lights of a police car by the Boathouse Café.
